jfruh writes “Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed a rash of often high-quality infographics by third parties appearing on your favorite websites. These images are offered to Web publishers free of charge, with the only request being a link back to the creator’s own site. But when one blogger got an odd email from a the creator of infographic he put on his site two years ago, he did some digging and discovered that he had inadvertently helped some shady characters do SEO spamming.”

SkinnyGuy writes “Roomba, the world’s first multi-million unit-selling home-helper robot, turns 10 today. iRobot has cooked up a self-congratulatory infographic filled with a collection of interesting and occasionally bizarre facts to mark the occasion. Did you know that dogs, cats and babies have ridden iRobot’s iconic home cleaning robot since it was introduced exactly a decade ago?”

It is time for another look at enterprise IT from our friends Chief and Chuck. If your management still thinks Facebook and Twitter are fads, then perhaps this cartoon will hit home. After all, if we could only just not be bothered all the time from our customers when they have problems, right? One way is to just ignore them, and the message from this cartoon is clear: You do so at your own peril.

It is time for another look at enterprise IT from our friends Chief and Chuck. If your management still thinks Facebook and Twitter are fads, then perhaps this cartoon will hit home. After all, if we could only just not be bothered all the time from our customers when they have problems, right? One way is to just ignore them, and the message from this cartoon is clear: You do so at your own peril.

Infographics are still a thing with a lot of companies, if my inbox is any indication. Easel.ly, a service that recently debuted in beta, is making it easy to create infographics online. Whether it should is another question.

Easel.ly is a Web-based tool for creating infographics. It’s still in its early stages, so you’ll find some rough edges, but it does live up to the “easy to use” promise. Select a theme, your objects and shapes, plop in some text, and you can have a passable-looking infographic in a very short amount of time.

Right now it seems to be missing a way to actually develop charts inside the tool – there’s just a placeholder for charts that drops in one static chart image. The color palette is “coming soon,” and the SVG export contains errors – at least as far as Chrome and Firefox are concerned. But, this is a beta product. Assuming the Easel.ly folks get the kinks worked out and fill out its features, it should be able to generate decent-looking infographics pretty soon.

Easel.ly doesn’t seem to be the only game in town for quick-and-dirty infographics, either. There’s visual.ly, which seems to have a few stock infographics you can create. I haven’t tried that one, though, because it requires authorizing via Twitter or Facebook. (Sorry, kids, I am not willing to give you access to my social media accounts just to create a lame infographic.)

Does the World Need More Infographics?

Judging by the number of infographics that are pitched to ReadWriteWeb, there’s a lot of demand for creating infographics. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more pink slime in infographics than actual beef these days.

To put it another way, most infographics suck. It was true when we wrote that last November, and it hasn’t gotten any better; if anything, it’s gotten worse, as companies keep churning out infographics in the hopes of a “viral” campaign. When infographics started to become popular, many were just thinly disguised promotional vehicles with dodgy data and a lot of self-promotion. Lately, they’ve dropped the pretense and just gone whole-hog on the self-promotion.

Want an example? I’ll pick on one of my former employers, who pitched me an infographic on 20 years of SUSE history (PDF). Now, there’s nothing wrong with SUSE promoting its 20th anniversary. There’s really nothing wrong with creating a nifty graphic that illustrates SUSE’s achievements over the years. But calling this an “infographic” is stretching the term to near breaking. At best, it’s a timeline with a few numbers thrown in. (Also, somebody needs to get the chameleon to the vet, pronto. It’s not looking very good.)

There’s this one from RewardLoop that is entirely self-promotional. Domo has one about “the incredible data explosion” that is as confusing as it is light on actual data. In the “Competitive Edge” section, it is entirely unclear whether individual companies are being compared, or industries as a whole.

The point isn’t to pick on these companies, though, but to illustrate a point: Infographics are apparently not that difficult to create. The Web is littered with them. But good infographics are difficult to create, because it means having worthwhile information and putting it in context – not just slapping some pixels together in a semi-pleasing manner to help with your branding.

The folks at Litmus.com have prepared this interesting infographic about to boost the results from your email campaigns. Who knew that your readers would be more likely to click on your messages if a button included an arrow icon? And that because of image-blocking features on most email programs, make sure that you use what they call a “bulletproof” button by combine HTML and background codes so that the button will be visible when images are enabled.

There are lots of other tips in this text-dense infographic, but I like it because it puts everything in a single place that normally you would pay big bucks for an SEO or mailing list consultant. Feel free to share some of your other tips here too.

A series of conversations this morning on our chat line along with this infographic published last month got me thinking about how many vendors are allowed to bill my credit card with any kind of regular frequency. Remember when eCommerce was first starting out and many folks said no one would use their credit cards for any online purchases? Seems so quaint now.

So here is my own tally:

Monthly subscriptions:

Vonage

Netflix

Hosting provider EMWD.com

Boingo wifi access

Condo fee

Irregularly Purchased items:

Amazon

Apple/iTunes

It isn’t a long list, on purpose. Yes, I would like more convenience with vendors to store my credit-card credentials, but I just don’t trust them. And I buy a lot of stuff online: almost all of my airline tickets and concert tickets for example. But I don’t store any of the credit card info.

Esther Schindler writes “Many of us geeks prefer to work at home without distractions, but a lot of bosses still believe that if they don’t see you, you must be lolling about, eating bon-bons and playing Angry Birds. ‘There may be many reasons a manager is distrustful of telecommuting but the phenomenon of what Albiero calls “presentism”—that is, only trusting and rewarding the folks you see at their computer is a major factor.’ So it may be of some use to read through the research compiled by Diann Daniel that says telecommuting creates happier and more productive employees (which naturally include fewer distractions and better work-life balance), and an accompanying infographic showing the environmental benefits from reduced commuting. She follows it up with suggestions on how managers can mentor and support teleworkers. Some of this is general advice, but some of the tips are more specific: ‘It may seem like a lot more work—all this up-front addressing of communication issues that happen far more naturally in the office—but the upside is increased efficiency. Albiero sees this especially in the area of meetings. He speaks of one client who has now instituted a meeting format that is structured to allow for the first five minutes of all meetings to be “small-talk minutes.” Thus, everyone knows they needn’t call in for those minutes unless they want to join.”